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Powys Notes 2.2. Fall 1986

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Powys Notes 2.2. Fall 1986 ----------Powys N otes---------- A Publication of the Powys Society of North America! F a l l , 1 9 8 6 i ThsE c Woridl In this issue of POWYS NOTES J we are pleased to offer a number of "firsts’' for our humble but growing publica­ JOHN COWPER tion: W. J. KEITH'S essay, O "John Cowper Powys and the X POWYS Regional Tradition," is the Z\ first conference paper that n m we have endeavored to pre­ o 8 sent in its entirety, while C on page 11 ANTHONY LOW *73 v.n tn provides our first ever I review of a major study of Powys, H. W. Fawkner1 s The O o Ecstatic World of John Cowper Powys. Also in this issue, *< t/3 readers will find abstracts of additional papers given at the Toronto conference in June, together with publish­ ing and membership news of H . W. Fawkncr various kinds. A s always, y o u r continents are invited on any of these items. W. J. KEITH: JOHN COWER POWYS AND THE REGIONAL TRADITION When as literary critics we examine the novels of John Cowper Powys, we generally think of them either in relation to each other or in terms of the accepted history of English fiction over the past century. In either case, they appear as out of the ordinary, off-beat, singular to the point of idiosyncrasy— and so, of course, they are. But no literary work is completely sui generis, and I suggest that Powys's navels become a little less eccentric and more compatible with literary history if we consider them in relation to the tradition of regional fiction that was at its peak during his early years as a writer. In very general terms, a regional novel may be defined as a fictional work in which a specific and identifiable setting becomes at least as important as most of the characters and exerts a palpable influence upon the action. Literary regionalism initially arose out of the popularity of Sir Walter Scott's Waverley series, which emphasized the associations of plare and 2 combined a Romantic interest in picturesque natural landscapes with an equally intense fascination for the supposed glamor of the past. For various reasons of which improved conmunications and the consequent opening up of remote areas of the country to what we now call tourism are perhaps the most important, the differences between regions became a fruitful subject for novelists. Much of the regional fiction that followed was of poor quality and ephemeral, but among the local and regional work that became a part of our permanent literature were novels by the Brontes, especially Wutherina Heights and Shirley, some parts of the fiction of Mrs. Gaskell and George Eliot, L o m a Doone (along with numerous other now forgotten romances by R. D. Blackmore), and of course the novels of Thomas Hardy that represent in many respects the high point of the movement. This brings us up to Powys's own time, and Hardy's example inspired a number of lesser writers whose names are still known but who are now comparatively little read. These include Eden Phillpotts, whose extended Dartmoor series appeared between 1898 and 1923; Sheila Kaye-Smith, who began publishing novels set in the Weald of Kent and Sussex in 1908; Constance Holme, whose remarkably perceptive books about estate-management and rural tradition in Westmoreland began appearing in 1913; Mary Webb, who had been publishing for over a decade before the sensational popularity of Precious Bane (1924); and, of course, D. H. Lawrence. The White Peacock (1911) was highly influenced by traditional regionalism, and traces of the same tradition may be found readily enough throughout his work, especially in the major novels such as Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love. I am not suggesting that Powys was familiar with all these works, nor that he would have placed these writers in any well-defined and related sequence, but he would certainly have been aware of much of their fiction. There is little doubt, I think, that he was influenced by their preoccupation with the relationship between individual lives and— to employ one of Lawrence's phrases— the "circumambient universe" in which they found themselves. Indeed, in my view it was Lawrence and Powys who, alone of the British novelists after Hardy, were able to transcend this tradition (which was then past its prime), to draw upon regionalist strengths in order to write novels that advanced far beyond regionalism itself. Powys's regional consciousness developed early. While he was at school at Sherborne, he records in his Autobiography, he "began to grow conscious of a more definite response to different kinds of natural scenery"; this was encouraged by his father, who urged his sons "to note every undulation, every upland, every spinney, every ridge, every fen and the effect produced upon all these by every variety of season or weather." * We can recognize here the origins of the atmospheric particularity that is so important an ingredient in the landscape-descriptions in his novels, but it was not until he left Cambridge in 1894 that a full sense of regional differences was dramatically brought home to him. At that time .he applied to a teaching agency and was assigned a position in a girls' school in West Brighton. Powys took the next train and, as he looked out of the carriage-window, was amazed by the subtle contrasts between the Sussex countryside and that of the Dorset-Somerset border that he knew so well: Sussex scenery . was certainly different from any scenery I had ever seen. Those huge Sussex bams whose vast sloping roofs were encrusted with orange-coloured lichen that was as strange to me as were the 'orange-tipped' butterflies I saw on the railroad banks, in place of our Dorset 'marble whites,' those mellow Sussex cottages where old dark woodwork was cunningly mixed in with brickwork and flintwork, those Sussex bricks themselves that . .gave a look to the whole scene so much warmer and sunnier than the Dorset thatch or 3 the Somerset stone, those enormous Sussex wagons, painted blue and scarlet, and of a size so large that they would have astonished a Somerset farmer, the trim, neat, picturesque Sussex villages them­ selves, where it all seemed as though everyone was so much more well-to-do than in the West Country, all these things struck me, sank into me, and abode with me.2 This is, I suggest, a central text for an understanding of literary regionalism. Not only does it isolate the details of architecture, building materials, the color and design of farm wagons— details themselves dependent on the more fundamental differences of geology and climate— but it conveniently demonstrates the extent to which generalized rural back­ grounds (the kind of descriptions we find in George Eliot, for example) differ from the minute particularities noticed and lovingly reproduced by the committed regionalist. Powys lived in Sussex for a time after his marriage and used this newly-discovered landscape in After My Fashion, just as he used the East-Anglian background with which he was familiar in Rodmoor and the opening chapter of A Glastonbury Romance, but the impor­ tance of this period of Powys's life for his later work derives from the fact that it impressed upon him the unique qualities of his own landscape, of Montacute and its environs. There is some uncertainty about the precise time at which Powys became aware of Hardy and his work. In a letter he wrote to Glen Cavaliero as an old man, he referred to "my passionate devotion to Hardy who taught me everything as a boy."^ In the Autobiography, however, he asserts that he had not even heard of Hardy until he left Cambridge.4 Personally, I find it difficult to believe that he could have grown up in Dorset and Somerset in the 1880s within a highly literate and intellectually curious family without hearing the name of the best-known west-country author, but that is a problem I will leave to the biographers. What is interesting and indis­ putable is that, when he wrote the Autobiography, he associated his first acquaintance with Hardy with the period in which regional differences had so impressed him. Thus he recounts how he bought his first Hardy book. Far From the Madding Crowd, at Hove. This discovery led to a (bad) poem in praise of Hardy included in his first volume. Odes and Other Poems (1896), which in turn led to his sending a copy to Hardy and receiving an invita­ tion to Max Gate. Years later Powys acknowledged himself as "a hero-worshipper of old Hardy,"^ a statement borne out by his account of how, on the day Hardy was reciprocating that visit, he announced to his family that "the greatest writer then living on this earth" was coning to visit them.^ And it is further borne out, of course, by the way in which Hardy is continually being recalled, either through indirect or specific allusion, in Powys's fiction. Above all else. Hardy gave him a landscape. The west country is always "Wessex" to Powys because he sees it through Hardy's eyes. Yet when, in his essay on Hardy in Visions and Revisions (1915), he writes that Hardy is identified "with that portion of England where the various race-deposits in our national "strata" are most clear and defined,"7 we can see that he is also capable of seeing Hardy's Wessex through his own eyes. This process can be seen evolving in Powys's first novel.
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